Christopher Merrill - Flare, poems

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. In April 2012 President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities. Both appointments on the UNESCO National Commission and the National Council on the Humanities ended in 2018 and 2019, respectively. His website is: www.christophermerrillbooks.com

Lodge

There was no record of our reservation at the hunting lodge, according to the clerk, who nevertheless managed to find enough rooms to salvage the symposium on nature writing. He was a retired barrister from Jammu and Kashmir, the division of which marked his life, casting light on his offhand manner of identifying the stuffed animals displayed in the lobby—moose and caribou, a tiger, a zebra, a wildebeest. The owner had dropped dead the week before, during a shooting party on the Scottish heath; no one on the staff seemed to mourn his passing. The oldest member of our party, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, liked to say, apropos of nothing, Now I can live. Keen to add to his life list, which included raptors from six continents and three separate species of extinct rails, he rose before dawn to walk in the woods, returning for our discussion—which included, at his insistence, the clerk, who was well-read in the literature of his adopted homeland. Their insights colored our exploration of how writers attend to their surroundings. Now I can live, said the war veteran, who was in fact on his last legs. How to explain the fever that came over me for you? All I know is that it never broke.

Gothic

The first goat was not named Billy, despite what you may have heard. He called himself Ernest Hemingway, and he spent all day balancing on the top branch of an olive tree, aiming his shotgun at the other goats on the hillside, Che Guevara and Ronald Reagan, who liked to tug his beard when he was in his cups. He would count to a hundred before squeezing the trigger, daring them to bleat again at the church steeple. Che was plotting revolution; the actor could not remember his lines. The sky turned orange, a lightning strike having ignited a fire that charred the mountains and destroyed all the houses and barns in the next valley; a timber baron surveyed the damage from his helicopter, which was running low on fuel; smoke and ash swirled around the olive tree. Close your eyes, Ernest Hemingway whispered. This is going to hurt.

Explain Yourself

Did God give me a son or a ghost? cried the old woman, peering out the front door. The beggar, who only wanted a handful of rice, hobbled away down the flooding street. The rainy season had begun with a protest march, the statues of the martyrs were blindfolded, and the night watchman, dozing on a hammock strung between two palm trees, wouldn’t rouse himself for the wedding guests arriving from the outermost island of the archipelago. Come on: these words were painted on the hindquarters of the pig selected for the feast. The old woman feared her husband, a plodding man, would use a dull knife for the slaughter, creating a bloody mess in the courtyard and bringing more bad luck to a family already singled out for misfortune. Nor was there enough perfume to disguise the fact that the bride was miserable. The beggar took his place on the curb, under a sheet of blue plastic, between a rickshaw and a rabid dog tied to the gate of the Ministry of the Interior. The groom was nowhere to be seen.

After Visiting the Gorky Institute

Someone set fire to the empty boxes stacked behind the shoe store, and the flames spread from the shopping district to the train yard, where three men in fatigues were passing the night trading stories about the strangest things they had eaten as peacekeepers. The smoke didn’t alarm them, and they barely registered the fact that they had to raise their voices to be heard above the sirens approaching from every direction. How to compare monkey brains to dog or rat? They stamped their feet as if to keep warm. They toasted those who had not made it home. One recalled losing his passport in Tanzania. Another tried to remember the terms of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace. The third confessed that on his last tour he had hidden in a sheaf of papers taken from his CO’s desk the court transcript of a man sentenced to death. He didn’t know what had gotten into him. The sky blazed above the tracks, the warehouses, the bridge. A freight train slowed for the curve before the platform, its whistle blowing. Another toast to friendship? Why not.

Flare

The rent was late, and nobody thought to dig up the sacks of gold buried under the black flags lining the road through the desert. At dusk a gas flare lit the eyes of a nomad who had lost hope of finding water this late in the season; his herd had been reduced by half, and if he believed that the oasis was no longer within walking distance he said nothing to his son, who was planning his escape, not to the city but to the refinery at the edge of the sea. One condition of employment there was to undergo weekly blood tests; the other, to ignore the orders of any engineer who did not kneel before the falconer. Open the door, his father said one night in his sleep. Who is it? said the boy. The landlord, said his father. His ship sails at dawn.

Roundabout

As the last wagon of the caravan approached the roundabout, the driver thrashed the horses he had acquired at an oasis hundreds of miles from the former capital; his original team had bolted at the sound of a meteor roaring across the sky at dawn; its glittering remains lit the way to the city. His notes on the drought went on for pages, detailing his losses in a meticulous hand. Some believed his testimony might explain what had propelled their exodus, without hope of alleviating their pain. Loneliness lay on his tongue like dust from a courtyard in the medina, where sheepskins were drying in a wire cage and a laborer recited verses from the Qur’an, rubbing his legs blistered from long days of wading in the vats of the tannery. Who could decipher the graffiti—New York, New York—on the palace wall? Friend or foe? said a policeman, reaching for his gun. A dog asleep on a sack of cement twitched and whimpered. The horses did not budge. The policeman took aim.

In Algiers

The ash fall hasn’t reached the city, and yet the sky at noon is pitch-black. Children in the Casbah huddle on the steps, shopkeepers pull down their shutters, and a visiting pensioner from the defeated army scans the crowd outside the cinema for the daughter of the man he persuaded to reveal the hiding place of his best friend. As the water rises in the harbor, a geography teacher sets his basket down and picks through the garbage heaped below the sea wall, wishing he had obeyed his father’s order to study medicine. A fisherman, weighing anchor, studies the couples strolling on the beach, under the reproachful gaze of the young man on the boardwalk who reads too much. Everything—everything!—fires his nerves. The pensioner marches toward the quay, sidestepping a colony of feral cats, which have their eyes on something. Black and white, he thinks. It was all in black and white. What do the cats see? A dead rat.

Fire

No one had driven the motorbike propped against the stone wall by the chapel since the capture, trial, and execution of the leaders of the local resistance. The remaining members of the cell fled into the mountains, where late at night they could be heard singing praise songs of their ancestral valor; and since the streams had run dry before summer—the drought was in its third year—they spent long days searching for water; also the keys to the motorbike and the treasury in the chapel, both of which were destined to burn in the forest fire that marked the Dog Days of August—and the advent of the uprising in the capital. Who could have predicted this? Anyone with ears to hear.

On the War Between the States

The bait? A plotline too complex to follow, which we swallowed whole, with predictable results. Around us lay debris from the Rex Ball, where the King was crowned with a plate of bread pudding filched from a wedding reception cobbled together by two families ruined in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They shared a financial advisor, who had persuaded them to stake their future on a match made in Hell—a one-night stand, that is, during spring break in Acapulco; no one was surprised when the marriage was annulled by Easter. Call it variations on a theme from The Decline of Civilization. There were so many white faces in the crowd waiting for the last heretic to be burned at the stake that he thought he was in Heaven before the flames reached him. You saw that one coming, didn’t you? And yet you refused to leave. Why?

The Pastoral Tradition

A man with a red bandana passed the football to the manager of the plantation, who was drawing up plans to grow pineapples instead of sugarcane. A dragon flicked its tongue at a pregnant woman, who could not afford another baby, and so she had gone to the river in search of the ferryman, who had stolen her goat and continued to send her flowers on Sundays. But he was nowhere to be seen. What she found was a jar of eyeballs and ears harvested from the last battle, which had ended inconclusively. And what she remembered of that dark time was dancing a jig, composing in her mind a lullaby for a child fated to be born on the last day of the world. Sleep, my little mongoose, she whispered, rooting around in her pocket for a piece of candy. No cobras here. The man with the red bandana cried, Run! The manager replied, This is not a dream. When the dragon set fire to the dried leaves of a banana tree trampled by an elephant, everyone shouted, Game over!